Even as the tensions in the Middle East remain miserable and muddied, the pipeline of films from that part of the world stays busy. One provocative missive, “Paradise Now,” just snagged an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.
| Simple: An interesting film highlights the complexities of life in the Middle East. (In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated, probably PG-13 for subject matter Now showing: Varsityon |
Now comes “The Syrian Bride,” a movie with a tantalizing mixed pedigree. Director Eran Riklis is Israeli, but screenwriter Suha Arraf is Palestinian, born in Israel. Their story is set in the Golan Heights, and focuses on a religious minority, the Druze, living there.
In the village of Majdal Shams, a family prepares for a wedding, and a farewell. Daughter Mona (Clara Khoury) will travel to the Syrian border to marry a man she’s never met, a minor TV star in Syria. It is understood that once she leaves the Israeli-occupied territory, she can’t come back.
This is far from the only complication. Mona’s father (Makram J. Khoury, the real-life father of Clara Khoury) is a militant under close watch by Israeli authorities. He’s been barred from being anywhere near the border, and risks arrest if he attends the wedding.
His two sons arrive from abroad. One is a fast-talking womanizer (Ashraf Barhoum) who runs a shady business out of Italy. The other is the much more sober eldest son (Eyad Sheety), who broke his father’s heart by emigrating and marrying a Russian woman.
These characters are all specific and interesting, but in many ways they are topped by the figure of Mona’s older sister, Amal (Hiam Abbass), a fiercely intelligent woman who chafes at the limited opportunities for women in Arab society. Her husband, a traditionalist, grows increasingly upset at his wife’s independence.
Riklis’ take on this material is sometimes frustrating, as the tone wavers. But by the time he gets to the long climactic sequence at the border, a satisfying note of Catch-22 absurdism enters the scene. The technical problems of passport stamps and by-the-book border police make the wedding look impossible.
The cast is very good, including Julie-Anne Roth as a French Red Cross worker who marches back and forth between border checkpoints as she tries to straighten out the bureaucratic snafu. Such border weddings really do take place, under the eyes of the Red Cross.
Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, who played the lead in “Satin Rouge” and is also in “Paradise Now” and “Munich,” gives the most complex performance in the picture. With her watchful eyes and hawklike face (she looks like Maria Callas), she conveys the frustration of living in a situation that’s broken and not likely to be fixed any time soon.
Clara Khoury stars in “The Syrian Bride.”
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